Picture Perfect
by templremus1990
Summary: What you draw can reveal more than you know. Collection of drabbles looking at the Torchwood team's works of art. Hints of Jack/Ianto, Jack/Doctor and Ianto/Lisa. Angst, humour, general weirdness. Enjoy!


**Picture Perfect**

**Gwen****  
**  
When Gwen was seven her mother had shown her how to draw a horse using a series of overlapping circles. It wasn't long before horses started to appear alongside all her written work, sometimes even drowning out the words. They reared on the front of her entrance exams and they leapt over paragraphs of police safety handouts.

Throughout her school life teachers often asked whether she wanted to work with animals, only to be met by a look of blank surprise. For Gwen the connection between her horses and the living, breathing reality had faded long ago. The drawings were her symbol of security, a sign that she knew precisely where she was going and how to get there. They were a way of knowing that everything made sense.

On the day of John Tucker's murder the horses vanished, never to return.

**Jack**

Jack drew boxes. Always the same size and shape, and always perfectly symmetrical. During particularly long phone conversations he would fill them in with a blue ballpoint, almost without looking at the paper. Once he'd hung up he'd forever seem surprised by the end result, tapping the pen against the table as if searching for a missing detail that could never be supplied.

Then he'd smile, tear the drawing lengthways, and head out of the office in search of coffee. Or, later on, of Ianto, who was usually within spitting distance of the former.

**Ianto**

The margins of Ianto's diary were home to many small sketches, usually of alien artefacts mentioned in that particular entry. A neat, proportioned diagram of a robotic hand had been scribbled over with pencil until it was barely discernible. After that entry the sketches became few and far between, and then they were often only in snatches; the line of a chin, the interlocking fingers of two hands. These were the first human outlines for almost two years, when the disembodied smiles and dark eyes of a girl used to float upon the surface of the pages, alongside her name.

Even then he never finished a sketch, afraid, as now, of losing the moment, the detail that had struck him from that one glance or single shared expression.

The final entry for that year was the most complete, showing the outline of a face, short hair rendered in biro, delicate arching eyebrows and the beginnings of a mouth, full upper lip curved as if in appreciation of some secret joke.

Then, nothing for a very long time.

**Owen**

The closest Owen ever got to art was scrawled on the back of a bar napkin in an attempt to explain the offside rule to Tosh. She had leaned over to watch as he marked out the details of the pitch and the various players in quick impatient strokes, before abandoning the attempt in favour of a demonstration with the bowl of olives, using cocktail sticks as goalposts. That was Owen; never one to show with abstract lines what could be told in actions.

That evening Tosh had smoothed the napkin out on her kitchen table, following the clumsily-drawn arrows with her finger as one would a map. At last she'd stuffed the crumpled tissue-paper deep into her rubbish bin, shaking her head at her own stupidity.

After all, she wasn't _that _desperate.

**Tosh**

As a schoolgirl Tosh had specialised in circuit diagrams. At first each was constructed with a ruler and HB pencil, then on computer programs she had set up herself.

If anyone had asked her why she made them, Tosh would have replied that operating within a closed system made her feel safe. The power to make it work, to form connections and bring the idea off the screen was all hers, and yet the rules were always there to tell her when to stop.

She would have described the odd little rush she got from seeing things fall into place, reduced to neat little symbols that anyone could read, as long as they knew the code.

She would have shown them her designs for homes, the network of intricate detail that made up the basis of everyday life.

But no-one ever asked.


End file.
